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26 December 2008

How to Create Vector Sun Rays

This blog has been inactive for the past couple of months, so I’m here to make a comeback and now I’ll be teaching you again some effects and techniques that I’ve already used on some of my tutorials

Software used: Adobe Illustrator CS3 - you may use other similar vector-based editing software but the instructions written are made to work well on Adobe Illustrator CS3

Difficulty - Beginner

In this tutorial I’ll teach on how to create sun rays in Adobe Illustra tor, the fun and easy way without some rotation and doing some math, if you want to know how this is done then follow through.

First let’s open Illustrator. For this tutorial we will use a 360px by 360px artboard, it doesn’t matter how big your artboard is, this is just for the tutorial.

Using the Ellipse tool or L for a shortcut key, create a circle, for this tutorial it’s 270px x 270px circle.

Click and drag across the stage while holding the Shift key [holding the shift key when creating objects constrains the height and width, thus resulting to a perfect circle] then release the mouse button when the circle when you’re done.

Now we have our circle, lets make it’s fill to transparent, and stroke to black.

From the stroke tab, make the stroke width to 50 or more, check the Dashed Line, then change the value of the 1st dash value as long as the lines are not intersecting each other, remember that less dash value means narrowerrays. in this tutorial i used 8pt.

It’s like we’re almost done. Now click Object > Expand then check Stroke to make it’s points editable.From the Tools menu, Click then hold to the Warp tool, a sub menu will appear, from there choose Pucker,

Before using this tool, double click on the pucker icon and a new window will appear. From the Pucker toolOptions, set the height and width to 260px, a slightly smaller circle than our circle object which is 270px, uncheck the details options and click OK.

If you want to interactively change the radius of the circle, press Shift + Alt then Click + Hold your mouse button, make sure that the radius of the pucker tool will only affect the inner points.

press and hold the left mouse button.

pretty easy huh, now you can set a gradient and set any colors to your fancy!